Category Archives: Products

So last year it came to that point in my career that I was just running out of space. All the time. It didn’t help that every time I filled up another external HDD, I’d just go & buy another one. My desk eventually had 6 external Western Digital HDD’s which I had to run into a 10-port USB hub, into my Macbook Pro. It worked, yet was rather messy. Not to mention I had my data backup up, but it was getting harder & harder to keep track of file duplicates.

I have been using the same file structure on my file backups for a very long time. It was a merge between Chase Jarvis’ system of using chronological structure & my own method of file & folder naming. I’ll get into that a bit later.

RAID is something that always scared me. How did it work? Why does it have to be so complicated? What are all these RAID numbers about? Why this price tag!? You know those moments in life when you hype something up so much in your head, and then you get to the day when you actually DO said-thing and it’s nowhere near the notion? Yeah, well getting a RAID setup is one of those things.

This post is mostly for those of you who feel the same way I did and are in the same position as myself. So much data, so much effort to keep it all well stored. And I’m happy to say, in the background I’ve helped a couple people take the plunge. My good photographer friend in LA, Webb Bland is one of them. I held his hand as he went through the process. It helps knowing that someone did it before you.

Now for those of you who have rolling in ‘hunnets’ this is an easy thing for you. You walk into a store & buy a Drobo. Chose how much space you want & part with your money without flinching. If you’re counting your pennies, you can still get a fantastic RAID setup for considerably less. This was my method.

You need something to house your RAID HDD’s. There are many brands who make units like this, but one brand stands out for me: Synology. A friend of mine who works in the IT infrastructure setup world swears by Synology. After doing extensive reading on what their units do technically, it was an easy choice. I had *almost* pulled the trigger on buying a (very cheap) unit from another brand, but fortunately I double checked the transfer read/write speeds -shockingly bad. Crisis averted there!

Once you’ve decided on your Synology housing unit, you need to fill that with physical HDD storage. Now depending on which Synology unit you go for, you need to get either 2, 4 or 6 HDD’s. Now personal history has me put my faith in Western Digital as a brand. I know this is one of those things where every person will tell you differently based on their experience. Unfortunately mine has been Seagate = failed drives. Western Digital = happy drives that last years & years. Now WD makes a series of HDD’s specifically for RAID setups. Isn’t that convenient! They’re called the WD RED series. They’re a lower RPM range (the disks spin slightly slower than conventional HDDs), but built like tanks. They’re meant to be used in servers that are running 24/7. So I got 4x 4TB WD REDs for my Synology unit.

That is the hard part. All the homework goes into knowing what combination you need for your purposes. The rest is really easy! Now RAID is defined as, “Redundant Array of Independent Disks. A data storage virtualisation technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into a single logical unit for the purpose of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both.” The concept of data redundancy is that you never lose data, should a HDD fail. So your data is spanned over multiple physical disks, while the RAID system does its sorcery in the background to make sure that your data is never isolated, thus lost.

There is a little bit of maths involved in RAID. So for example, I bought 4x 4TB = 16TB of physical data. However, we need that thing called redundancy, so you don’t get all 16TB of storage. RAID reserves a portion for it’s redundancy & gives you the balance. Now in modern Synology RAID systems, you get something called “Hybrid RAID” or SHR. It is “an automatic RAID management system from Synology, designed to make storage volume deployment quick & easy”. Basically, this system takes 1/4 of your available space & uses this to make your “hybrid redundancy”. So for mine specifically, my 16TB of physical space becomes 12TB of usable storage space. This makes the different RAID structures (RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, etc) obsolete. I didn’t know this when I bought my Synology unit, but has been one of many incredible features to Synology.

Installing the 4 HDD’s into the Synology unit is a piece of cake. Each HDD has it’s own drive bay which just clips in. These trays just slide into the Synology unit. It’s impossible to get it wrong because everything can only go in one way.

I need to add something in here before we continue. Synology makes units that are meant to be used as a network based server/storage/NAS unit. So when I bought the unit, I didn’t realise that the connection port for I/O would be ethernet. I’m pretty sure I read it, but it didn’t register in my head. There ARE USB ports on the DS414, but these are for adding extra external USB drives, should you wish. If you’re going to be using your RAID unit on a PC that has an extra Ethernet port, then you’re ready to rock-n-roll immediately. If you’re like me, who uses one of the new(er) Macbook Pro’s that have no ethernet ports, then you’re in for one more $2 purchase. You’re going to need a Ethernet-to-USB3 dongle. I bought mine on eBay for about $2 I think. Be careful that you’re buying a USB3 (!!) dongle & not USB or USB2. This WILL become the bottleneck in your data transfer and you will wonder why your backups are taking forever. That is my disclaimer.

Moving onto powering up the unit, you’ll connect to it like you would a router or remote device: by IP. Your quick start guide in the box will give you this IP. The setup is automatic prompt-type. The Synology system will format the HDD’s in the correct file structure & your Hybrid RAID setup in one go. Once you’ve run through it all, you’ll be greeted with Synology’s virtual desktop for your RAID. Here you can go wild by installing server services, streaming services, hosting options, you name it. I feel like I could be using my DS414 for so many things, but use it for 1% of what it can do. But in my case, it is there for 100% work data storage, so I’m not interested in the list of things it can do.

I like the idea of plugging my NAS unit into my Macbook Pro with 1x USB cable & having access to every single work file I’ve ever created. This is what this system offers me. Again, I could use my DS414 as a wireless RAID unit, but I’ve never even gotten around to being that fancy. Now for my MBP, I enabled “Simple File System” in the settings somewhere. Basically this allows me to “mount” my NAS unit as I would a USB external drive. The bonus is that I can login/password protect my unit. So my data is both safe AND I have file redundancy.

Because I’m only writing this blog about my NAS unit over a year later, I can say that it has been one of the best investments I’ve ever made for my data. It has been the most rock solid, FAST and reliable setup on a budget. At the moment, I’m sitting on 9TB of 12TB used. When I hit the 12TB mark, Synology has a daisy-chain setup. So I just purchase another unit, link the two with an Ethernet cable & carry on like normal. It couldn’t be simpler.

I think this blog post has been long enough, so I’ll save how I handle my file structure to the next post.

EDIT: Synology is constantly updating their product range. It appears that the DS414 unit is no longer available & has been replaced with an updated DS416 unit.

I’ll be honest, I have oddly been waiting for this one for a couple months. As always, it’s been rumours upon rumours hinting at what *might* be. Now this isn’t because I’ve found my Nikon D800E to be disappointing. Not one tiny bit! The D800E has gone around the world with me several times in the last couple years & has shot everything from editorials to large print campaigns in the Dubai deserts, mountains of Spain, skyscrapers of New York & faux-glam Hollywood. I’ve even filmed a fair amount with it too. I’ve put my D800E through it’s paces & it has delivered every single time. I would easily say it’s one of the best cameras I’ve ever owned.

So why am I excited about a replacement to a perfectly good (near perfect 35mm system) camera? Well, we always want more don’t we? Yeah, we’re unsatisfiable that way. Damn us. Pretty excited to see this morning that Nikon has launched the D810. I’ll mention a few highlights for me & if you want a super technical rundown, the boys at DPReview are always riding that pony.

‘Split screen zoom’ display in live view allows horizons/lines to be leveled precisely

51-point AF system with new ‘Group Area AF’ mode (inherited from D4S)

1080p @50/60fps

Zebra strips for focus checking in video mode

Uncompressed HDMI output with simultaneous recording to memory card

Built-in stereo microphone

Now suddenly it becomes very evident that they’ve taken what the D800E is & made it what the videographers have wanted all along. I know I felt the limitations of the D800E when it came to filming specifically. No uncompressed footage, no full HD @ 50fps, no zebra strips. Albeit these are all things that were possible by hacking your body & making use of things like Magic Lantern. But for those of us who didn’t want to go that route it was a little frustrating to do without.

Nikon says launch is the latter half of July 2014. I’ve already put my order in for one & look forward to giving you a more hands on review when I get my paws on it.

How would you like to trade 1 single Sunday morning breakfast for the full versions of Adobe Photoshop & Lightroom CC, which honestly rule the photographers toolbox? Well that is now exactly what it equates to. Adobe has announced that their Photography Program is now set at the permanent price structure of $9.99 a month. What is that for us South African’s? It’s a measly R106.45 as of this morning (19 June 2014). That is a little more than an Arnold’s breakfast & latte bill.

What does this mean for us as photographers? A version of Photoshop was always a pretty hefty investment (those of us who buy our software) and I would tend to often skip versions if there was nothing I felt was critical to update. Then when Adobe announced the CC version along with the new structure of ‘renting’ the software instead of purchase I will admit I was very on the fence. The internet was amassed with angry users, happy users, the nonchalant (myself). Admittedly Adobe had some kinks to iron our with regards pricing. I personally felt the update was not worth it & happily just carried on with my life.

With the new $9.99 p/m pricing structure for both Photoshop & Lightroom CC, it has become very hard to ignore the absolute value of this offering. If you still think that spending 100 nelson bucks on 2 pieces of software that RULE your business operation then maybe being a photographer is not for you. The benefits are regular updates & essentially anything in future development from Adobe. Their recent push into the mobile platform editing/cataloguing sector is a very interesting one to watch.

So what are you waiting for. If you aren’t already, get legit & sign up. I can’t but help hearing the TV licence jingle in my head when typing this. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Well HELLO Profoto! The industry standard lighting kits we’ve all come to love over the years for many many reasons has just dropped what is very near the proportions of the A-Bomb. Profoto B1 Off-Camera Flash is a stand alone, 500W (220 full power pops) no wired, no cables lighting solution. If you’ve gotten your head around using speedlights on location, this will rock your world like Madonna for the 80’s.

It is no secret that I love my iPhone. Many times I’ve posted shots that were taken on my phone which can often be used for way more than just a snapshot of an ‘event’. I’m not going into a massive debate about iPhone camera vs ‘real’ cameras, because this is something the entire internet photography community has rehashed to no end. If you think an iPhone is in ANY way a substitute for a SLR, you’re an idiot. The iPhone is a sub-par tool that does the same physical thing, but has massive limitations on output. That said however, what makes the iPhone so great is that it is ALWAYS with you. An iPhone photo of something is better than no photo at all. So there. That part is done.

Now, moving onto the topic I wanted to discuss. I play around extensively with some ‘hidden’ features of my iPhone camera. Just like with a SLR, if the monkey holding it doesn’t tell it what to do, it won’t do it. The iPhone doesn’t unfortunately have any manual mode where you can set the ISO, shutter speed & aperture. Yet, it is exactly like a compact camera that has ‘modes’ -just without having to change the mode yourself. This does mean that you can still control to a certain degree what the camera does.

So below I’m going to outline the most commonly used techniques I use and then also, something that is brand new to iOS 7 which I stumbled upon right after I updated my phone. I’m easily most excited about that, but let’s start with the techniques first:

1. Thirds Rule Grid

By default, when using your native camera app, there are no visual guidelines on the screen. You can however enable a very handy visual guideline called Grid. It is found by going into Settings > Photos & Camera > GRID (enable). You will now notice your screen has 4 light lines dividing up your screen into thirds. Use this when shooting to help your composition be more pleasing. Put horizon lines on a third line. Have subjects intersect at third lines. Go wild. It doesn’t guarantee the most award winning photo from here on out, but it does help you compose something a little more pleasing to the eye.

2. Be Wild West Gunslinger Fast

With the revamp of iOS 7, certain things have moved around somewhat. For the most part, better. I’m often grabbing for my phone when I see something happen which I want to quickly snap before it’s gone. Normally this is a car of some kind for me. Old iOS required a double tap which revealed the camera icon, then going into camera. iOS 7 now has a ‘always visible’ camera icon in the lower right corner. Just slide this up quickly & presto! Camera is open & ready to fire! What if you’re already on your phone & want to quickly take a picture? Well just swipe UP anywhere on the screen to reveal the Control Center. Again bottom right has the camera icon.

3. Swipe Everything

Everything is now done with swipes. In Camera App specifically, swipe left & right to go into different modes: Video, Photo, Square, Panoramic. This makes things so much easier if you want to change modes quickly & without having to navigate a menu.

4. Live View Filter Presets

As a full time photographer, I often make use of Lightroom’s Presets function. This is the ability to adjust an image in a certain pre-selected way over & over again. What Lightroom doesn’t have is a Live View preset function. Your camera app does though! Selecting the 3 colour circles at the bottom right corner will bring up 8 different filters you can apply in Live View. Personally, I haven’t been using this feature too much. I tend to do any image adjustments in 3rd party apps which give me much better control over the image. If you have no image processing apps installed, you can still apply a preset by going into your Camera Roll, selecting an image, hitting Edit & again selecting the 3 circular icon.

5. Lock Focus & Exposure

This little trick is something not many people know about. I’ve been surprised how many folks I’ve been able to show this to! I think everyone knows that if you tap on an area of the screen it will set the focus & exposure (as best as possible) for that area. Now what if you find this isn’t giving you the exposure you’re after? This trick lets you override the cameras built in ‘modes’. Let’s say for example you’re in a room that has bright windows. You just need a good exposure for the room interior & don’t care about not being able to see outside too. Hold the camera away from any window area so it adjusts the exposure for the room interior. Now, TAP & HOLD the centre of the screen. You’ll notice the focus box will ‘grow’ twice until you see a “AE / AF LOCK” block. You have now locked the Auto Exposure & Auto Focus to that point. If you move the camera back to an area that has a window, the camera will no longer change exposure & your room will remain the correct exposure. Cancelling the AE/AF Lock is easy -just tap anywhere on the screen again & it will release the lock. Pretty cool huh! Think of this as the closest to manual mode you’ll get on the iPhone. If you get clever with this trick, you’ll find there is little you can’t do.

6. iOS 7 HDR Redesign (super powerful!)

This is what I’ve been most excited about since upgrading to iOS 7! They have seriously beefed up the HDR (High Dynamic Range) feature. I found myself always frustrated with older iOS versions because the HDR feature was slow & therefore almost unusable because of something called ‘ghosting’. Sounds scarier than it may be. HDR is the technique of taking more than 1 image at different exposure values to combine them into a single, higher dynamic (details in shadows & highlights) image. The problem with this is things move between those shots. When it all gets stacked together, things don’t match up (trees, moving people, etc) and you get ghost objects. Well the boys in the tech labs at Apple have certainly put some time behind this problem, because the new HDR feature in iOS 7 no longer has this problem! When enabling HDR, it is firstly incredibly fast. Secondly, it now takes three images at the same time to give you a much better transition between highlights & shadows. Thirdly, because the images are taken at exactly the same time, you no longer have ghosting in trees, etc.

Now all this all might sound like fancy talk, so I decided to do some hard testing before writing this article. See my test images below for a hard comparison between a single shot photo vs HDR. You’ll notice I really tried to create the harshest situations with shadow & highlight areas in 1 frame. The amount of detail that is retained is incredible. Add to this no ghosting & super smooth tonal transitions and you have one super powerful pocket camera device. What this allows is greater processing ‘wiggle room’. Very much like real world photography where one works with 16 & 32bit images whenever possible, because it gives you more freedom to manipulate an image.

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Well that wraps up my article about Apple iOS 7 camera app tips & tricks. As a full time automotive & commercial photographer who doesn’t always have his Nikon D800E SLR with him, these are my go-to techniques. If you have any further questions or suggestions, please leave a comment below & I will get back to you. Alternatively catch me on Twitter or Facebook.

If you like to follow the blogs like Nikon Rumors for possible info on the new tech/models Nikon might/will be releasing, you might have noticed one that they posted a couple weeks ago about a “Serious underwater compact camera”. Not much else as far as info, but enough to catch my eye. Underwater photography isn’t my forte, but I have been on the lookout for something that I could take snorkling/diving when summer comes around. Although with the weather in Cape Town, ‘summer’ seems like a distant cousin right now. Be that as it may, taking some great underwater photos on my next trip below the waves is high on my agenda.

Enter Nikon’s new 1-series AW1. This is being hailed as the first digital waterproof/shockproof ILC (interchangeable lens camera) on the market. An O-ring that has a normal bayonet lens fitting (like our SLR’s) is what seals the lens & body when you decide to take it under the waves. It is rated to 49 feet, which in el-normal language to us South African’s is 15m. A depth way below what your average snorkel might take you (unless you’re a buddying freestyle diver in the making). Regular SCUBA dives might border on 15m depending on location & visibility, but overall, a decent enough depth to take photos at.

The kit comes with a 11-27.5mm f3.5-5.6 lens which offers a nice range for underwater & general wide angle shooting. Don’t discard the use for landscapes just because it can go swimming with the AW1. It is also dust-proof, shock-proof, kid-proof, grandma-proof. The 2nd lens release (in the same durable style of the AW1 & 11-27mm) is a 10mm f2.8 lens, for those who like it super wide & want the added wide aperture benefits in low light. If you are an existing 1-series Nikon owner however, never fear, your regular 1-series lenses will still fit on the AW1 thanks to a little adapter. However going swimming with regular 1-series lenses is not recommended… of course.

Under the hood, the AW1 is almost the same as the J3. The CX-format sensor pushes out 14.2 megapixels, which you can crank up to ISO6400, throw in 1080p full-HD video with pop-up flash unit (that can be used underwater too) and you have the main specs. The AW1 however comes with loads of extra McGyver style toys like altimeter, GPS, compass, depth gauge and an accelerometer-powered option for switching camera modes one-handed, should your other hand be, err, occupied.

The USA retail price is set at roughly $800 (AW1 + 11-27mm lens) and the 10mm f2.8 at an extra $200. Local pricing is still unknown, but I’m sure we’ll all know soon enough after the first shipments take place next month. Follow Nikon South Africa on twitter, facebook & also watch the Orms website as they generally one of the first stores to get stock. Hopefully I’ll get my hands on one to review more in-depth when they land in SA. Follow me on twitter to stay tuned.

There is nothing more time consuming than trying to work out which piece of kit you’re going to get next. If only there were a way to quickly compare any camera on the market with other potential buys… but WAIT! (insert cheesy infomercial music)

Nothing I’m affiliated with in any way, but did stumble upon this morning, so totally worth sharing with you guys. A new website called CameraRocket. Compare just about anything in seconds & get more info about each of your comparisons than you can shake a soggy stick at. I know there are several websites like this one, but this one really stood out for me by how clean & simple their system was. I’m always for clean & simple!

What a pleasant surprise it is to see internet titans of websites (or used to be) come up with something new & fresh to keep up with the competition. Our eye falls on Flickr this morning, who have in their very delayed manner FINALLY updated their style theme to reflect the 21st century instead of the antiquated 1998 style of website. One can only but notice a heavy push in the direction that 500px.com has always had: minimal, clean & fresh.

If you haven’t already, you might want to check out (and maybe start using again like myself) the new Flickr.

The big news today is coming from Adobe on the product launch (not rolled out yet) of Photoshop CC. There are 2 major Adobe changes:

1. No longer is Photoshop offered as a physically purchasable product. It is now only available through Adobe Cloud.

2. Adobe is no long calling it Adobe Creative Suite, but rather now Creative Cloud.

3. They now offer a camera shake de-blur function so we’ll be seeing a lot more people shaking their cameras while shooting because they want to try this feature out.

Ok that last one is obviously poking fun at Adobe thinking we’re going to be using this feature. I personally doubt I’ll EVER use it, because most of my work is for print & obviously nothing is going to make a CSI-worthy *BAZINGA* enhance de-blur image ok for print. For web? That’s another story.

Adobe has just launched the beta version of Lightroom 5. As always, while in Beta phase, the download is completely free, so get it as soon as possible to enjoy the longest free usage. Some might find it is a bit buggy & crashes, but this will be a case by case scenario. I remember I used LR4 Beta for ages with zero issues. So just keep in mind that you don’t want to do any major client work on a Beta product should something happen.

Now the new features aren’t possibly as long a list as I would have imagined. Probably because LR4 is a pretty damn good comprehensive package as is. I use it extensively in my editorial (mostly) workflow because it makes it so much easier to do multiple adjustments & offers some really nice colouration tweaks that are more time consuming in PS. In any case, the mad scientists locked away in Adobe Labs have this to offer:

+ Advanced Healing Brush – Think clone stamp tool mixed with a bit of content aware brain
+ Upright – Straighten horizontal & vertical lines. While not totally new from Adobe (this is built into PS) it is nice to have it conveniently placed in LR. Helpful for those without a TS lens & shooting interiors perhaps.
+ Radial Gradient – Nothing terribly special on this one, but again it saves one several mouse clicks to achieve something.

There are some more features, but to be honest, none of them actually appeal to me personally. For the wedding guys, the photo book creation has gotten a revamp. I’d like to see some more work done to the different modules. Do some work to the speed of loading 1:1 previews & just beef up that whole area in particular. What I’d really like to see is a Loupe option like Bridge has. Something that allows me to check focus on a small area of the image instead of having to wait for the entire 1:1 image to load.

I’ll check it out comprehensively when I get back from my current trip. Until then, give it a go & let me know your thoughts in the comments.